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General Intuition Raises $220M at $6.2B for World Models

General Intuition Inc. has closed a $220 million funding round that values the company at $6.2 billion. The startup builds world models, AI systems that generate synthetic video which can be used to train other AI models, including those that control robots.

The round brings in a long list of investors: Valor Equity Partners, Atreides, Seven Seven Six, Point72, Khosla Ventures and General Catalyst. It lands roughly a year after General Intuition was spun out of Medal B.V., a video sharing startup.

A gaming clip library as training data

The company's origin explains its data advantage. Medal offers a free tool that lets players capture and record footage from video games. General Intuition uses that footage to train its own AI models.

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DoorDash AI Agent Takes Food Orders by Text Message

DoorDash wants customers to skip its app entirely. On Wednesday, the delivery company announced a new AI agent that takes food orders by text message. It runs inside Apple Messages instead of DoorDash's own interface. For now, people in the U.S. can sign up for a waitlist to try it.

How the agent works

You write what you want in plain language, and the agent turns it into an order. DoorDash's own example is a message like "order my usual." The company says the agent can work out that this means the order a customer normally places on a Friday night, and then act on it.

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EliseAI Raises $350M at $4B Valuation for AI Automation

EliseAI, which builds AI software for two very different customer groups, property managers and healthcare providers, has closed a $350 million funding round. The deal values the company at $4 billion.

Andreessen Horowitz and Bessemer co-led the investment. Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan, Sapphire Ventures and Navitas Capital also took part, according to the company's announcement on September 29.

The money will go toward broadening EliseAI's automation features. The company also plans to hire more engineers, software deployment specialists and salespeople.

From rental leads to repair tickets

EliseAI, formally Elise A.I. Technologies Corp., was founded in 2017. It started out in rental housing, and that market is still the core of its business. The company says its platform now supports the management of more than one in six apartments in the United States.

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Meta Disputes Claim Muse AI Agent Read Private Messages

Meta is pushing back on a report that its AI agent Muse accessed a user's private messages on a Mac without permission. The company says the scenario the journalist described is technically impossible. The journalist says it happened anyway.

The dispute began with a report from Jason Aten, a columnist at Inc. Two Meta executives have since responded publicly. Neither has addressed Aten's explanation of how the access might have occurred, beyond saying it could not have.

What Meta says

Andy Stone, Meta's VP of Communications, answered the report on X. "The Messages integration in the Muse app for Mac is entirely opt-in," he wrote. "You have to enable both Full Disk Access and the Messages connector for Muse to be able to read your Messages content. It can't read your Messages unless you do this."

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Google Gemini Skills Replace Gems in Agent Prompt Shift

Google is retiring Gems, its tool for building custom versions of Gemini, and replacing it with "Skills." The new feature is rolling out to Gemini chat users worldwide. With this change, Google joins OpenAI and Anthropic in moving away from personalized chatbots and toward reusable instruction packages that an AI system can call on when needed.

Gems were Google's answer to OpenAI's Custom GPTs. OpenAI is also phasing those out. The format replacing them did not come from Google or OpenAI. Skills started at Anthropic and are now published as an open standard.

What a Skill actually is

A Skill is a detailed prompt written for a specific task. Users can draft one themselves, or have Gemini help write and refine it. The goal is to store instructions you would otherwise retype often, and then call them up on demand.

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